Friday, February 14, 2014

Welcome Back Post: Back Hall Gallery, and Current Work

What I like to call the Back Hall Gallery, a smallish Syracuse space I help keep an eye on while shoveling the sidewalks. This week featuring artworks (left to right) by my Central New York art scene colleagues Molly MacBean, Richelle Maki, Kathryn Petrillo, and Arianna Lynch.

My own Ariannascape, influenced by Arianna Lynch's fantastic glowing cityscape motifs seen in the Back Hall shot. Done on a leftover tree core sample from my father's research work for SUNY ESF. This piece apparently an example of Walton Beech collected in 1986.

A view showing the depth of the slab, nice chunky things, and I'm calling that spot in the center Giacometti Plaza, with the whole scene depicting the Margheriti City forms that had been in my landscapes. Here we are seeing it at night, the building forms suggested by the downtown scenes in Utica and Syracuse where I've been working the art scenes. Or trying too, though we had a serious setback at one of them this week that has got me thinking about how badly I want my own gallery space where artists can be free to show there work outside of most any constraint.

Fun In Space #7: Waterfall Moon, this one painted on a slab of firewood saved from the heap during a 2010 camping trip. The vertical streaks are gouge marks left by the chainsaw used to cut the wood, which had a marvelous knot form in the middle that became the sinkhole waterfall at center.

A crop down of just the central image. Several colleagues urged me to pursue this science fiction influence. I've always been enamored by space ships, rockets, Star Trek / Star Wars, the Apollo program, Ridley Scott's "Alien" (1979), "Flash Gordon" with the Queen music, and pulp science fiction imagery in general. The purpose is not to be representational but to pursue a motif which might suggest narrative overtones.

Zombie Horde Shambling from the Space Pyramid on Cosmonaut's Hot Date to the Planet of Love.

A crop down detail of the barfing zombies infesting the Planet of Love.

Space Zombie

Fun In Space #8

Fiddler Cosmonauts Three

Final Four Cosmonaut, or Syracuse University Cosmonaut With Basketball

Cosmonaut's Lighter Just Kicked It

Cosmonaut With Walkie-Talkie

Green Cosmonaut

Alien With Rocketship -- done in collaboration with my eight year old niece, who read the helmet on one of my cosmonauts as an open mouth.

Alien Skull

Fun In Space #5: "Twenty Thousand Light Years From Earth and YOU Locked Your Keys In the Spacecraft??"